In January of last year the actor Ricki Lake posted a selfie with a buzz cut. In the caption she revealed that she had been suffering from hair loss for nearly 30 years. “Ever since I played Tracy Turnblad in the original Hairspray back in 1988 and they triple-processed and teased my then healthy virgin hair every 2 weeks during filming, my hair was never the same,” Lake wrote. She’d gone “from Hairspray to hairless.” The response to her confession, which reached an even larger audience when she appeared soon after on Good Morning America, revealed just how many women related to her struggle.
It’s a huge issue, says Birmingham, Alabama–based dermatologist Corey L. Hartman. “Up to 40 percent of women experience noticeable hair loss before the age of 40, with as many as 80 percent seeing hair loss by the age of 60,” he says. For women, hair loss can take a …